peter putz eternal archives: montréal 1988/89

Peter PutzThe Eternal Archives

Les Archives éternellesMontréal · 1988/89

“You have to give things a form, an order, so you can understand them better. And that is what you do when you make a film or engage in other artistic activity: you try to introduce order, at least temporarily, so as to clarify one or two questions because there is no way to grasp chaos in any case. I think that this is a way of tolerating the disorder in which we live or perceive the world.”

Agnès Varda

Il faut pouvoir donner une forme, un ordre aux choses pour mieux les comprendre ; c’est aussi en cela que consiste la réalisation d’un film ou toute autre activité artistique : nous essayons, du moins tem-porairement, d’introduire un ordre et d’élucider ainsi une ou deux questions – car on ne peut, de toute façon, saisir le tout chaotique. Je crois que c’est une manière de supporter le désordre dans lequel nous vivons ou sous la forme duquel nous ressentons le monde.

Agnès Varda

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for / pour:Barbara & Luca

and for / et pour:Stefan Anastasiu · Mario Falsetto & Carole Zucker · Bob, Felix & Setsumi Del Tredici Pierre Hébert & Sylvie Massicotte · Jonathan Leaning · Anne-Marie Smith · Hanna Tugendhat

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The Eternal Archives were created by Peter Putz in 1980 and can be understood as a dynamic encyclopedia of contemporary identities. They are Austria’s most comprehensive non-commercial, independent image database, with images dating from 1905 and a metadata index with detailed keyword referencing.

The focus is on photographic note-taking: preserving traces of everyday activity, documenting and comparing a variety of places where people live and work – Vienna and Montreal, Ebensee and Poznan, London, New York, Berlin, Lisbon, as well as Paris, Vandans, Baghdad and Rome.

These photographic records interconnect to form a multi-facetted network of greatly differing realities, with particular attention being paid throughout to the profane, the normal, the ordinary and thus pointing out its importance. Images have been collated into thematic tableaux.

The basic material for the tableaux presented here are photographs taken in 1988/89 during the nine months that Peter Putz spent as artist in residence at Concordia University in Montreal.

Fondées en 1980 par Peter Putz, les Archives éternelles se comprennent comme une encyclopédie accélérée de l’identité et de la réalité contemporaines, basée sur la « permanente note photogra-phique » : relevé des empreintes du quotidien, documentation et comparaison de divers espaces de vie et de travail portant une attention particulière sur l‘aspect spectaculaire du non-spectaculaire.

Les Archives éternelles se présentent comme une mine de données comprenant des photos, des films et des vidéos, des expositions dotées de tableaux grand format et d’un site internet, mais aussi comme projet ouvert aux conférences, aux publications et aux ouvrages.

Les matériaux de base qui ont servi à la création des planches présentées ici sont des photograhpies prises par Peter Putz pendant un stage de neuf mois qu‘il a fait en tant qu‘artiste résident en 1988/89 à l‘Université Concordia à Montréal.

Peter PutzThe Eternal Archives

Les Archives éternellesMontréal · 1988/89

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Montréal | CAN · 1988 – 1989

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Mont Real 1988/89, Montreal/CAN, 20 min., 16mm, color, live action and animationA film by Peter Putz, in collaboration with Barbara Putz-Plecko, Austria/Canada, 1988/89Concept, direction, artwork, animation, camera, sound editig, Austrian voice of Gumbo YaYa: Peter PutzCollaboration, editing, painting: Barbara Putz-PleckoTranslation, French voice of Gumbo YaYa: Anne-Marie Smith; Music: Romeo Alavi Kia, Ingo Petry

This short film of twenty minutes‘ duration was produced during the nine months that Peter Putz spent as artist in residence at Concordia University inMontreal.Mont Real is a satirical view of our Western civilization, something between a live action film and an animation film, a successon of associations combining aspects of traditional and everyday life in North America and stereotyped European, particularly Austrian, attidudes and behavior patterns. The film deals with our over-powering fantasies, our tendency to repress certain elements of our mental lives, and with our enslavement as dependent consumers in a materialistic society. This is shown in a development of sound and image that is for the most part ironical and contrapuntal.

Gumbo YaYa, the protagonist – a person who would think of him-self as being endowed with a good deal of common sense – explains his world in three languages: English, French and German. This polyglott medley in the film originates to some extent in the fact that the film was produced in a bilingual country. It is also meant to provocatively counteract the widespread fear of foreign languages and cultures, which are commonly seen as menacing, ominous forces; a fear that seems to be quite common in Austria as well as in many other parts oft he world.A compound puzzle of scenes taken from everyday life constitutes both sound and image in the film. To give an example: the narra-tor’s text fuses original quotations of things said by politicians and other persons of note with quoted fragments of what is generally referred to as public opinion; also, in the film modern Austrian music is mixed with Indian pow-wow songs.

The extremely rapid development of the various visual aspects of the film corresponds to today’s rushed and short-lived deluge of informa-tion and stimulation. It also illustrates two parallel but wholly differ-ent levels of life and argumentation, and in the process some of our perceptive faculties and visual habits are taken to their limits.We have to accept the fact that we cannot possibly perceive every single detail, and we must recognize the limits of our perceptive faculties, knowing that whatever we see is only part of the whole truth. All this is necessary to enable the viewer to achieve a better understanding and to observe things freely.

Peter Putz, peintre, dessinateur et réalisateur de films d’animation, a réalisé ce court métrage pendant un stage de 9 mois en tant qu’artiste résident à l’Université Concordia à Montréal.Mont Real est une réflexion satirique sur notre civilisation occiden-tale, un montage qui combine film et film d’animation dans lequel plusieurs aspects de la vie traditionnelle et quotidienne d’Amérique du Nord se lient à des attitudes et à des comportements stéréoty-pés de provenance européenne, et plus particulièrement autri-chienne ; nos « fantaisies de toute-puissance », nos tendances de refoulement et notre asservissement à la consommation sont ainsi traitées sur les plans de l’image et du son, qui se développent d‘une manière marquée par l‘ironie et le contrepoint.Le protagoniste, Gumbo YaYa, un homme qui se considère plutôt comme quelqu‘un doté d‘une bonne quantité de bon sens, nous explique son monde en trois langues (anglais, français et allemand). L’idée de faire un film trilingue est en grande partie issue du fait que ce film se réalisait dans un pays bilingue. Mais c’est aussi une tentative d’aller à l’encontre, de manière provocatrice, de la peur très répandue des langues et cultures étrangères, souvent perçues en Autriche comme partout dans le monde comme des forces qui nous menacent.Les plans de l’image et du son se composent d’une multitude d’« objets trouvés » dans la vie quotidienne. Ainsi, le texte du narrateur coupe des citations originales d’hommes politiques et d’autres personnes connues de la vie publique avec des fragments de textes exprimant ce que l’on appelle si souvent l’opinion publique ; aussi, la nouvelle musique autrichienne se joint-elle aux chants pow-wow indiens.Le développement extrêmement rapide de plusieurs aspects visuels du film correspond à l’inondation constante, précipitée et constam-ment changeante, d’informations et de stimulations qui marque notre quotidien. Il illustre également le parallélisme de « plans de vie et d’argumentation » différents, mais aussi les divergences entre ceux-ci. Ils se heurtent consciemment aux limites de notre capacité de percevoir et de certaines facultés visuelles. Ce n’est qu’en s’ar-rangeant avec ce qui nous échappe, avec le fait aussi d’être forcé de tout voir, d’être limité en ce qui concerne notre réceptivité, tout en sachant que ce que nous percevons n’est que fragment, qu’on a la possibilité de révéler plus, de regarder de façon ouverte et sans contrainte.

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Montréal | CAN · 1988

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Montréal | CAN · 1988 – 1989

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Montréal | CAN · 1988 – 1989

Montréal | CAN · 1988 – 1989

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Montréal | CAN · 1988 – 1989

Montréal | CAN · 1988 – 1989

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1) Leslie Jamison, ”What Should an Essay Do? Two new collections reinvent the form“, July 8, 2013 http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113737/solnit-faraway-nearby-and-orange-running-your-life

Shaheen Merali is curator and writer, currently based in London. Previously, he was Head of Exhibitions, Film and New Media at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2003-2008) where he curated several exhibitions accompanied by key publications, including The Black Atlantic; Dreams and Trauma – Mov-ing images and the Promised Lands and Re-Imagining Asia, One Thousand years of Separation. Merali was the co-curator of the 6th Gwangju Biennale, Korea (2006). Upon leaving Germany he curated many exhibitions in India and Iran and then embarked upon a period of extensive research and consultation on the conservation and production of a major exhibition of the International Collection of the Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata (2010- 2012). His recent exhibitions include Refractions, Moving Images on Palestine, P21 Gallery, London; When Violence becomes Decadent, ACC Galerie, Weimar; Speaking from the Heart, Castrum Peregrini, Amsterdam; (After) Love at Last Sight / Nezeket Ekici Retrospective, PiArtworks, London and Fragile Hands, University of Applied Arts Vienna.Merali has written catalogue essays on Agathe de Bailliencourt, Jitish Kallat, Sara Rahbar, TV Santhosh, Cai Yuan and JJ Xi (Madforeal) amongst others. www.shaheenmerali.com

If you cannot put into words what you feel or believe, if you cannot, at the same time, contain what you know about the world, its spatial-ity or how the whole effects your day to day – then what do you do?

Do you seek the meditative possibilities of silence or gradually stage the possibilities beyond the unsayable?For many of such a disposition, the possible evolves in encroaching forms, bearing the marks of excavation from untamed imaginations. The results may be described as poetic or paradoxical, solutions, chang-es or modifications that persuade us to alter the passage of our uni-verse. The much quoted opening line of the profound novel, Metamor-phoses by Franz Kafka, is an important example: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself trans-formed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” A certain epistemological license further authorised the contemporary Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami, to write his metaphysical mind-bender, Kafka on the Shore. In both novels the tools and means to make apparent were forged innately in the visual; an expanded visual which no longer remains contained in traditional categories of notations that separate the writ-ten, the choreographed or the painted. Herein the processes bear witness to the specters of thinking. The process of making from the intangible, the intransient, the untranslatable, and even the impalpable, results in this form of visu-alisation. The residual material often forms mental images that help us grasp the frail, visual perceptions from which they emerge in the first place. Not all is possible, but aspects of the visual can sometimes be made more comprehensive during the creative process. For those able to communicate through such fleeting moments of lucidity, then, what is represented is neither the internal nor the exter-nal landscape but a potent mixture of emancipated memory, bridging immense complexities of the imagined as well as the emotional. In forging creatively, visualisations supersede fictionalisation or narra-tives. In many ways what emerges are sensitive accounts, daring juxtapositioning and dark subversions as a form of expression. The narration continues, taking its emphases from the visual rather than from an inscribed or articulated transmission. We are, after all, born with the eyes that we die with as all other organs grow and constantly transform from the time of our birth.For the eternal archivist, Peter Putz, the visual has become a daily practice of recording, organising the recorded and reiterating its place in an ever-increasing composite graphic. This solitary effort has engaged his artistic faith, constructing a bewildering record from the mundane to the extraordinary that crisscrosses his life path. His lifework, The Eternal Archives, in many ways parallels the release of archived materials by institutions, as in the recent case of the Met-ropolitan Museum of Art, releasing 400,000 images online for non-commercial use or the newsreel archive, British Pathé, uploading its entire collection of 85,000 historic films, in high resolution, to its You-Tube channel. Putz’s Eternal Archives release and sporadically emit, in the form of booklets, publications, films and videos as well as photo-graphic works, for a public which is never sure of its ambition or how its contents are to be managed as it circulates in the field between documentary and fine art photography, diaries and voyeurism.The Eternal Archives are a turbulent entity, for they never sit entirely comfortably, ensuring them a cult status in these remarkable times, where, in a click or at a moment’s command, a vast amount is arranged before us by search engines, limiting our horizons by dictat-ing our visual range.

Instagrammed, pinterested, downloaded, usb(ed), Picasa(ed), the list is immense and all these have pervasive rules and philosophies that dictate the way we read the entire visual library that they supply. These rules are often based on security or, erstwhile, on how subjects inhabit truth or imply power over the body or society. Truths create a pool of knowledge in these zones of contact, and we, as viewers, become virtual subjects of visual lands, possessed by all the experi-ences that we share, becoming familiar with what is offered as much as by what is repudiated. Irrational laws, of what can and cannot be presented in its epistemological limit, heavily influence Facebook as an archive. In drawing on these conceptual frameworks of the imaginative and the lived realities as a holistic way to encapsulate the world, Putz manages to create his Eternal Archives from daily recordings and frequent sorties, in combination with accidental and estranged encounters.The eternal becomes the entirety of his ability to reconstitute the recorded in these formulaic “pages“. “Pages“ that often contain four to five images from a constituted situation can range from a studio visit to a visit to a florist or, further afield, studies as a tourist. In being placed within a ”page” the images act as a set of hesitative notations for a larger body of images, images that embody both spatial and geographical temporalities but, most importantly, speak volumes about the artist’s inquisitiveness. One cannot rely on these “pages“ to give us the full picture of those images that remain absent from or present in his private archive – The Eternal Archives present a partially mediated picture. This selective archive is the process through which Putz visualises the whole, the world and his place within it – it is both the taste and the sum of the culled and the framed. Putz has been successful in continually assert-ing this visualisation by producing both larger format books and smaller edition supplements that testify to his notion of the construct of the eternal. There is no seeming end to his capturing the world around him in daily recordings with his lens-based frolics. The eternal remains to be added to on a daily basis, supplemented by further roving and often-repetitive explorations of the found, confounding the relation to the already archived. It is both a quest and a journey, which Putz takes with a joy and pas-sion that permeate all the pages, both challenging and giving testi-mony to the desire to create as Kafka and Murakami have done, the meandering mind making from the mundane a statement of living and thinking in the dark edges of his digital trace.As Leslie Jamison recently said, “…accumulation, juxtaposition, the organizing possibilities of metaphor. These techniques are ways in which the essay has always linked the private confessional to the communal…”1

The Long Breath

Shaheen Merali

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Montreal | CAN · 1988 – 1989

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Montreal | CAN · 1988 – 1989

from top left: Robert Del Tredici; Hanna Tugendhat; John Low-Beer; Normand Roger & Marcy Page; Mr. Keller & employee; Don McWilliams; Stefan Anastasiu; two fellow inhabitants, Rue Sherbrooke Ouest; Carole Zucker & Mario Falsetto; Pierre Hébert & Sylvie Massicotte; Peter Putz; Chris Hinton; Barbara Putz-Plecko; Setsumi, Robert Del Tredici & Barbara Putz-Plecko; Anne-Marie Smith; Peter Putz & Jonathan Leaning

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Montreal | CAN · 1988 – 1989

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Montreal | CAN · 1988 – 1989

This catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition The Eternal ArchivesCe catalogue paraît à l’occasion de l’exposition Les Archives éternelles

The Topological Media Lab · Concordia University 1515 Rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest, EV-7.725

Montreal, Quebec H3G 2W1 2015

Publisher · Editeur :

Peter Putz · Les Archives éternelles · The Eternal Archives

Design · Mise en forme : Studio Putz+ Medien · Grafik · KunstDigital image processing · Arrangement numérique des images : Peter Putz

Translation / Traduction : Shawn Bryan, Ute Weinmann

A-1060 Vienna · Mollardgasse 85a / 1 / 41 +43 (0)1 310 01 74 · 0 664 111 98 12

[email protected] · www.ewigesarchiv.at

All photos except otherwise mentioned: Sauf mention contraire, toutes les photos :

© Peter Putz · 2015

time is on my side.

Peter Putz was born in Ebensee/Austria in 1954. University of Applied Arts Vienna (M.A.). Study and work abroad: Poznan, Poland (1977/78); Montréal, Canada, Concordia University, artist in residence (1988/89); Paris, France, Cité international des arts (1990); New York, U.S.A. (1995). 1979 founded the Bild-Manufaktur-Traunsee (Image-Manufacture-Traunsee) with Hans Kienes-berger and Walter Pilar and published the picture-text-edition of Der Traunseher (1978 – 1981). First animated film 1978; has lectured on film and new media at numerous universities. Since 1980 has been working on the project The Eternal Archives. 1988 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art Vienna 1994 publication of the book Das Ewige Archiv · Virtual Triviality 2012 Das Ewige Archiv· Heavy Duty XS, presentation and exhibition at the Wien Museum2014: Das Ewige Archiv · New Stuff, Kunsthalle Wien/Museumsquartier 2015: Les Archives éternelles, Paris, Maison Heinrich HeineRobert-Musil-Literaturhaus, KlagenfurtNumerous exhibitions and awards, lectures and publications.

Peter Putz (*1954). Université des Arts appliqués/Vienne; séjours d’études et de travail à Poznan (PL), Montréal, Paris, New York. 1978 – 1981 : édition avec H. Kienesberger et W. Pilar de la revue en textes et images Der Traunseher ; 1978 : premiers films d’animation ; chargé de cours à l’université (Vienne, Klagenfurt, Montréal).Depuis 1980 : travail sur le projet des Archives éternelles.1988 : présentation du projet au Muséee d‘Art moderne de Vienne. 1994 : publication de Das Ewige Archiv · Virtual Triviality. 2012 : Das Ewige Archiv · Heavy Duty XS, Wien Museum. 2014 : Das Ewige Archiv · New Stuff, Kunsthalle Wien/Museumsquartier2015 : Les Archives éternelles, Paris, Maison Heinrich Heine Robert-Musil-Literaturhaus, Klagenfurt Participation à de nombreuses expositions, lauréat de nombreux prix et distinctions, nombre de conférences et des publications dans plusieurs pays.

Humor and Sharpnessfor Peter Putz

You don‘t sayNo one‘s waiting for me

You don‘t sayLet me sleep

Ingram Hartinger

Why collect photos? Why take pictures, why keep them, arrange them in some kind of order, look at them, rearrange them in a new, different order? Why try to establish connections? Is it to ward off the prospect of oblivion? To resist the threat of death? To rebel against a death that has occurred?Again – photos that were found: photos taken by my father in 1958, when he was in Mosul, Iraq, and glass negatives of photos taken by my grandfather in the years 1905 – 1925.

Photographs are always being brought to my attention, sometimes they are given to me as presents, sometimes I find them. How do I make head or tail of photos when the person who took them is no longer here to tell me things I need to know? How do I go about putting images together? What stories do I tell? What can I do to help ensure that images and the memory of those who produced them survive with a reasonable degree of authenticity?

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Peter Putz

DAS EWIGE ARCHIVThe Eternal Archives · 1980 – ∞

Heavy Duty XSRITTER

Peter Putz

DAS EWIGE ARCHIVThe Eternal Archives · ∞

New StuffRITTER

We live in a constant swirl of images: in social networks, texts, photos and videos come at us in automated surges driven by algo-rithms. What gets recorded? What new data gets fed – by me/by others – into the image machine? Where are the data farms and the data mines located? How much do images cost? Who buys them? Who makes money off them? Who pays for them?In a sense, I monitor my life and the lives of a few other people. I often photograph friends and acquaintances over long periods of time then put the photos together as time-lapse portraits, if for no other reason, to show the changes that take place.

The Eternal Archives are an attempt at taking stock of life as it slips away from us, it is a gathering of visual bits and pieces of a world that in many parts is disintegrating, fragmented.

P. P.

peter putz eternal archives: montréal 1988/89

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